Also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg-_HeVNYOk&feature=youtu.be
BLUH!?
I was going to post a link to that video here myself, but gosh darn it Shim you beat me to it! Man, I thought that *I* was being way over the top and melodramatic when I made that whole Judge Doom melting Derpy in "the dip" reference in an earlier post above, but wow, what I wrote doesn't even begin to hold a candle to this video! Watching that sad little crushed and crying Derpy makes even me feel horrible and guilty, and I never did anything to hurt Derpy and love Derpy as a character overall! Heck, I must love Derpy considering the fact that I recently blew $64.00 on WeLoveFine Derpy merchandise... Ouch! On a side note, if the makers of the show had just used this fan's Derpy voice instead of the original voice that they decided to go with, I bet that everything probably would have been fine-- go figure.
Speaking of my WeLoveFine Derpy merchandise purchase, I did receive it on last Tuesday, February 28th, as promised!
Let us know if the shirt quality has improved any from when I reported on the one I got. In the latest Bronyville episode's We Love Fine spot, they mentioned something about them that eluded to a possible change in production.
On the positive side, and it is a huge positive side, the sand-colored Derpy messenger bag that I bought is absolutely *awesome!* It's made of a really thick cotton canvas, and feels like one of those heavy old military-style messenger bags that you can get from an army surplus store. It also came with two cute little buttons, one of a muffin, and one of Derpy's cutie mark, to decorate the outside with! It's pretty big in size, and it can hold a laptop as big as 17-inches easily! In fact, it is probably massive overkill to carry the brand new netbook computer that I recently won from an Information Technology trivia competition, but hey, I will have the most rockin' laptop bag out of anyone at my various Microsoft developer user group to be sure even if it is a little big for the computer! I am absolutely ecstatic about this purchase as the bag turned out to be of really high quality, and it is definitely worth every last cent of the $39.00 that I paid for it!
As for the "I just don't know what went wrong" Derpy t-shirt that I also purchased, well, if the WeLoveFine people are going to be changing the quality of the t-shirts that they use in their production they haven't done so yet. My new t-shirt was the exact same really thin and lightweight cotton "Made in USA, Assembled in Haiti" Pacific-brand t-shirt that my "Mobile Dash" and "20% Cooler Long Pose" t-shirts that I bought back in November were, so there was absolutely no change there. Oh well, I made the purchase knowing full well what kind of t-shirts WeLoveFine puts their designs onto, so I guess that I can't complain. The t-shirt is O.K. and wearable, despite the material being so thin. It just would have been nice to have been pleasantly surprised by a better quality t-shirt, you know? In any case, I absolutely *adore* the Derpy design on the front, and I absolutely can't wait for the upcoming Lake Area Furry Friends monthly bowling meet next weekend so that I can show this awesome t-shirt off!
As with last time, WeLoveFine included some extra odds and ends with my order. One of them was a large foam "Mighty Fine" red heart-shaped (floating?) key chain (
). I also got a "DJ Pon-3/ Vinyl Scratch" We Love Fine decal, and a pony-less We Love Fine-logo decal. However, the biggest freebie by far was the
absolutely massive "Mighty Fine" fabric bag that I received that featured "Hello Kitty" on one side and Rainbow Dash wearing steampunk-style flying goggles on the other. This bag is *huge.* I don't have it sitting in front of me at the moment so I am guesstimating its size from memory here, but it is somewhere along the lines of 3.5 to 4-feet tall and 2.5 to 3-feet wide. At the same time however, the material that it is made out of seems to be really thin and extremely flimsy, so despite its large size I would not trust putting more than a couple of t-shirts into it. Actually, trying to fill its large capacity with stuff would probably be a no-no, because your stuff would probably end up back on the ground again in short order in you know what I mean. So while the bag may more than big enough to hold an entire
Silicon Graphics Indy graphics workstation with all of its peripherals inside of it, fight the temptation and don't do it man! The bag just won't be able to handle it, and you'd end up with a broken Indy! The best feature about this massive freebie bag has to be its appearance, since the designs on each side cover the entire bag and the colors are very bright and vibrant. As a result, the bag would probably make a far better wall decoration than a bag, really. With that said, that probably won't be happening any time soon on my walls, because currently every inch of my bedroom wall space is taken up by animation production artwork, with the majority of it being my "Duchess" from
The Aristocats shrine. Ah Duchess-- now there's one mighty fine feline! *sigh*
And here's the final word in Derpygate. AKR herself responds to the crisis: http://www.equestriadaily.com/2012/02/amy-keating-rogers-response-to-derpy.html
Like Narei Mooncatt said, I highly doubt that this is anything close to the final word in this whole Derpy SNAFU. However, it does provide a little bit of insight into the production process of the show and sheds some more light on how the wheels came off the bus as far as final content review on this episode. Here are some of my own personal thoughts and interpretations on Amy Keating Rogers's e-mail response:
When I first wrote this episode, the character under such harsh scrutiny was named Ditzy Doo. We had already established in previous episodes that she was clumsy (she is not the pony you want on your moving crew). And we named her Ditzy Doo thinking of her as a being a bit dingy.
I had actually figured as much, and while hindsight is 20/20, it probably would have been better if they had just kept "Ditzy Doo" as this poor mare's name. That particular name had previously been mentioned once in "Winter Wrap Up" without incident after all, and they also could have better argued with any mis-interpreting fans and/or overreacting network executives that Ditzy Doo is just an innocent klutzy ditz just like her namesake says. Oh well, it's too late now.
For the second draft, I was asked to change Ditzy's name to Derpy as a "tip of the hat" to the fans. So, not knowing that Derpy meant anything beyond klutzy and clumsy, I did as requested And then I was finished with this episode.
Now here is where things start to go astray. Ms. Rogers does not specify in her e-mail who it was that asked her to modify her draft to include Derpy's name in it as a "tip of the hat to the fans," but man, if I was an executive-level Grand Pooh Bah at Hasbro, Inc., I would be chewing that guy out right about now. That person should have known better. To elaborate, while Mr. Mooncatt here may feel that "the term 'derp' has never referred to someone's mental capacity, but to someone's klutzy action," not everyone in the entire world interprets the term that way. See the third definition for the word "derpy" on Urban Dictionary for example-- it defines "derpy" as a drop-in replacement for the word "retarded." And while that may not be the #1 definition for the word "derpy" on the site, it's definitely there, which means that there are definitely people out there who interpret the word that way. And while you may not personally agree with that interpretation, can you imagine the executives at Hasbro taking your position and trying to explain to both angry brony fans and upset parents that *they're wrong* and not interpreting a nebulously-defined slang word correctly? Heck no-- the executives are going to apologize to all of them and make the required changes post-haste, which is exactly what Hasbro ended up doing.
You know, in a way all of those people fighting over the proper definition of the word "derpy" kind of reminds me of the 30-odd year long fight within the computer hacker subculture to change the popular meaning of the world "hacker." They have tried over and over again for decades to convince both people and the mass media that the word "hacker" means something along the lines of "one who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations," instead of "malicious computer criminal, vandal, or fraudster," but so far they have been overwhelmingly unsuccessful. They even tried to make up new terms such as "cracker" and "white hat" and "black hat" to differentiate between the two meanings, but that too has been largely to no avail. In fact, all that they probably managed to accomplish was to confuse the issue further. The fact of the matter is that as soon as some portion of the population starts to perceive a word a certain way, whether you feel that they are correct or not, you still have to now take into account that people are perceiving the word that way. This seems especially true in an American culture that seems to be absolutely obsessed with political correctness these days. In fact, for the past two days two of the top stories on MSNBC have been about people being caught not being politically correct and how their heads should be served up on a platter for it, with the first one being some Federal Judge in Montana and now (big surprise) conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh. You need to be *especially* careful when your dealing with a children's show, and there are probably overly sensitive parents out there that will be shocked and appalled by almost *anything.* As a result, having Derpy being actually called "Derpy" in the show was really a pretty big blunder, especially when you consider that during the first season of the show Hasbro's Educational and Informational staff barely even let the term "egghead" get used because they thought that that term was too offensive! With that in mind it is absolutely amazing that somehow "derpy" got through!
I had nothing to do with the original voice casting. In my mind, she was ditzy, as her original name implied. But that's not anything I was ever involved with MLP.
While calling Derpy "Derpy" in the actual show probably lit the fuse, the original voice that the production staff recorded for the character is what I have long believed to have been the powder keg. I remember back when I first saw that part of the episode I ended up immediately asking myself, "What the heck were they thinking?", and now, all of these weeks later I am
still asking myself that same question. I sincerely believe that Ms. Rogers is telling the truth when she says that she always viewed Derpy as only being a ditz, and all of this was completely unintentional on her part. Derpy's portrayal in all of the episodes before this prove this to be true. But it seems to me that Derpy's original voice actor didn't interpret Derpy's character in quite the same way. While no one person can ever predict how everyone is going to react to everything, and Derpy's voice actress may have had no idea that she was making a voice that could be viewed as being potentially offensive, that is why there is a multi-stage review and editing process with several drafts, multiple stages of production that need to be approved by several different people, etc. for show like this. In a show as tightly controlled as MLP:FiM where terms like "egghead" get placed under scrutiny, I just can't believe that someone at DHX Media/Studio B, Hasbro Studios, etc. didn't catch this and say, "hey wait a minute here, somebody might misinterpret this." It still blows my mind that this got by *all* of them without any of them questioning it.
As far as why I still care so much about this so much that I am standing on my soapbox and griping about it yet again, it is because like the rest of you I loved Derpy/Ditzy Doo, and I am as bothered as everyone else here on how she is being altered and possibly even eventually removed from future episodes. I'll really miss her if she goes. However, unlike a lot of bronies out there who seem to be content with blaming those who got offended as being overly sensitive, or blaming people for interpreting the word "derp" wrong, or what have you, I really want to blame whoever the person was within Hasbro's studio system that told Ms. Rogers to change her script and call the character "Ditzy Doo" "Derpy" as a "tip of the hat to the fans." Geez, come on people at DHX Media and Hasbro Studios, whatever you do,
don't tip your hats to us! We are an adult periphery demographic for a children's show! We may represent an interesting set of "golden eggs" to you figuratively and monetarily speaking, but pander to us too much and we'll poison your golden goose! We call things politically incorrect names like "derpy," talk about how the mares have fantastic "plot," write "clop-fics," draw Rule 34, create works like "Cupcakes" and characters like "Mollestia," and have probably done some even more deplorable anti-social things that I haven't even learned about yet!
Look at how outside people perceive us! Keep us as far away from influencing the show's production process as possible, please, because otherwise we will tarnish its reputation! If you want to make a "tip of the hat to the fans" do it through some of the other outside things that you're already doing like making convention appearances, making more show-accurate toys, and answering the occasional fan question online-- just keep us out of the production process, because we are an entirely different culture than what the show was designed for and will run afoul with what the network executives are willing to tolerate. I don't want to hear someday about how the entire show got canceled because some production staff member decided to make a "tip of the hat to the fans" by sneaking a romantically kissing Lyra and Bon Bon into the background of some scene only to have some conservative parental advocacy group find out about it! I don't need the potential for a
"Hot Coffee"-style scandal with my 'Ponies! Luckily, I think this Derpy incident really shook things up, so that won't happen. Probably both to our benefit and our detriment, I bet there will be a much tighter scrutiny on new MLP:FiM episodes by the production staff from now on. As I mentioned above, the production staff shouldn't really be letting us influence them too overly much because we're nothing but trouble.
As a side note, if we can accept everything that Ms. Rogers wrote word-for-word in her e-mail as fact then I am *very* surprised by how little input the show's writers seem to have in the production process once the final draft of their script is turned in. Considering the fact that the writers are a pretty important part of the creative process, I would have thought that there would have been more collaboration between the writers, the storyboard artists, the animators, the voice actors, the executive producers, etc. throughout the entire production process, but I guess not. I suppose that some of this lack of collaboration is due to the intense pressure of keeping to a television production time schedule, but still, I would have never have imagined that the writers would have been kept out of the loop to such a degree. I mean, according to Ms. Rogers e-mail, she didn't even know that they shortened the Derpy scene that she had written into her script until she saw the episode air on TV. That's pretty nuts. I guess this shows me two things:
1. A lot of the little story problems that I often find and nitpick when I am doing my reviews of the MLP:FiM episodes in the Season 2 discussion thread may not be the fault of the writers at all, but the fault of the rest of the production staff chopping up the writer's script later during production, and
2. I really need to read that book that I got for Christmas on television animation production,
Creating Animated Cartoons with Character: A Guide to Developing and Producing Your Own Series for TV, the Web, and Short Film by Joe Murray. It would be interesting to gain some additional insight into the process!
In any case, it looks like we finally get some new 'Pony tomorrow, and I can't wait for it. I don't know when I will be able to write my thoughts about the new episode because they are now being aired during the middle of the day when I, a nocturnal creature, will be sleeping, and since I also have a meet-up with the Chicago-chapter of the Software Development Community early the next day (we're going to hear a presentation on Microsoft's new Silverlight 5-- woo hoo!), that means that I can't spend 8-hours on Saturday night/Sunday morning writing about it since I will need to hit the sack early that night. Oh well, I am sure you will all get to read my thoughts about the new episode "Putting Your Hoof Down" sometime, because my massive text-walls of doom are more inescapable than one of Ahuitzotl's temple death traps!
